I was thinking about whether to post my thoughts on the now-infamous WSJ article on darkness in YA . But so many wonderful things have been said already, on twitter and across the blogosphere.
Instead of ranting, I thought it might be nice just to have some loving sharing time. Lots of folks seemed to resonate with the process of putting your first novel to bed. It got me really curious about what everyone's first projects were. So! I cordially invite you to share your first novel, first short story, whatever today. Anything you loved and lost, as Kari Marie put it so beautifully in her comment yesterday.
I'll get the ball rolling:
My first novel was about a bratty princess who was abducted by an evil wizard and forced into a war to rid the land of all non-human creatures. She killed the wizard (after falling in love with him), saved her kingdom (after learning they were genocidal maniacs), and instead of becoming the hero, royally effed up everything.
I wrote it when I was 19, and I still love it. But it was 150,000 words long (*urk*) for what was basically a middle grade premise. So I laid it to rest.
What about you? What are the stories you mourned for?
Fun post! :) My first novel, which met a peaceful demise without ever getting finished, was about a girl from a tribe of Amazon-like women and a girl from a city of mages who were selected for no apparent reason to travel together to recover a magical crystal from an evil lord to save their land, from what I'm not exactly sure. Of course they hated each other and had to learn to depend on each other, which happened after about one day of traveling together. I stopped writing it after about 120 pages, when I realized I had no idea what the story was about.
ReplyDeleteOkay, not counting all the terrible stories I've written before graduating high school...
ReplyDeleteA fairy girl has the power to control time and make plants grow, but this is a seemingly useless talent in the world of fairies, since the worth of a girl is determined by the beauty of her flower and not her gardening skills. The girl is kidnapped by rogue Weeds then rescued by the fairy prince. He proposes, but she doesn’t believe he could possibly love her when she has an no flower, and rejects him. She later realizes the mistake and has to hurry and reconcile with him before he marries another.
I'm game. I worked on the same story for nearly 20 years before realizing I'd long outgrown it. It was going to be epic -- a trilogy. Each one about a different sister.
ReplyDeleteThree princess of very different personalities are sent by their father to rule different lands acquired in a long war. The first book focused on the middle sister, sent to a castle on a mountain. A wizard and a centaur join her. She goes on a quest to find a cure for the magically poisoned grass killing the livestock. A centaur guides her, she falls in love with him. An evil wizard tries to marry her so he can steal her babies for their life force. The ghost of his dead wife, a betrayal by the centaur who turns out to be a human blackmailed by the bad guy, and all sorts of other messy bits follow. Epic, I tell you. Epic. I wouldn't touch it now even in a hazmat suit.
Love this idea!
ReplyDeleteMy first novel was a contemporary YA of approximately 130,000 words, written before I did a stitch of industry research. It was the very low concept idea of a couple trying to get over a sexual assault attempt on the girl and included dozens of looong, soul baring conversations. It was also dual point of view and written in a confusing before/after format. Despite all its faults, I still sort of love it and can now see it as the crash course in writing it was.
OMG my first novel was rewritten three times, each time only getting to the 100-page mark. It was a clusterf*** of all clusterf***s -- a paranormal romance about a girl vacationing in the Greek isles who's in a boat taking pictures, when a random guy falls out of the sky. Random guy turns out to be a former guard of the Charites (Graces -- deities of Charm, Beauty, Nature) who was cast out of Olympus by Aphrodite because he couldn't keep his pants on. And of course photographer girl turns out to be a Charite-in-waiting, only she didn't know it (and neither did I, for that matter) and NATURALLY, they fall in love. But *gasp* their love is forbidden because guards -- even cast-out guards -- can NEVER FALL IN LOVE WITH DEITIES and that was basically the plot of the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteAnd this is why it shall forever be buried in my hard-drive. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the reason why my laptop crashed.